Psychiatric Research. Papers Read at the Dedication of the Laboratory for Biochemical Research, at the McLean Hospital: By Cecil K. Drinker, Jordi Folch, Stanley Cobb, Herbert S. Gasser, Wilder Penfield, and Edward A. Strecker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947. 113 pp.

This group of papers makes up the ninth monograph in the Harvard University series on Medicine and Public Health. While each of them is oriented toward the general topic of psychiatric research, there is no integration of the several points of view expressed, and each stands by itself as an exposition of the particular author's more or less well-founded conception of what psychiatry is.

Dr. Drinker, discussing the history of research at the McLean Hospital, states: 'My many friends in psychiatry may disagree with me, but I think it fact that psychiatry has not advanced in the last forty spectacular years as have general medicine and surgery'. Thinking of psychiatry in terms of the chemistry of the brain he is '… impelled to the conclusion that so far as mental disease is concerned the credit side of the ledger has little to show'.

Dr. Folch, the new Director of Scientific Research at McLean Hospital, contributes a brilliant review of Biochemical Problems Related to Psychiatry. A biochemist, it is not surprising that he is '… prompted mainly by the consideration … that psychiatric conditions are indeed diseases of the brain'. Regardless of this his paper is a masterpiece of scientific exposition and presents data relevant to the problem of the biological aspects of ego development. Thus one is impressed by the fact that 'in the first years of life, when the material basis of personality is laid down, the brain occupies a central position in the energy balance of the whole organism'; furthermore, in the newborn infant, the phylogenetically younger areas of the brain are functionally nonexistent. These areas have what Folch calls 'metabolism of growth' while only adult neural structures have a 'metabolism of function'.